Is it new? The Sunburst version has been out for a while. One of my guitar-playing friends got his in 2009 and just retired it, I believe. The paint on the fret buttons was completely worn out. This is a guy who got HOPO-cidal Maniac in 2010. Maybe January 2011. He's not the best plastic guitarist in the world, but he is a damn wizard on the 5-lane. (He's still working on getting up to Medium on Pro, though, haha.)

The last two are actually RBN tracks (sorry, PS3 owners!) but they're good enough to actually be real DLC, so I figured they were worth mentioning. "Time Bomb" is about average, but "Super Villain" is an awesome track. Also, yay for getting another song from the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack. We already have "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen from the RB3 disc, and I was informed on GameFAQs that we actually have "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division as well. I forgot to verify this. (If you haven't seen "Donnie Darko", get on that, you've missed a gem.)

The last two are actually RBN tracks (sorry, PS3 owners!) but they're good enough to actually be real DLC, so I figured they were worth mentioning. "Time Bomb" is about average, but "Super Villain" is an awesome track. Also, yay for getting another song from the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack. We already have "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen from the RB3 disc, and I was informed on GameFAQs that we actually have "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division as well. I forgot to verify this. (If you haven't seen "Donnie Darko", get on that, you've missed a gem.)

Yeah but Powerman 5000's most famous, and best, song is noticeably absent. I don't want also-ran B-side crap, I want "When Worlds Collide".

Yeah but Powerman 5000's most famous, and best, song is noticeably absent. I don't want also-ran B-side crap, I want "When Worlds Collide".

Agreed. What's the Powerman 5000 song we already have? I believe it was just 1 single. I own it. Can't look it up from here. I might be just thinking of "Push It" by Static-X (and I apologize for the mistake, if so) but I wanna say there's one PM5k song already out.

I'd definitely rather have "When Worlds Collide" than "Time Bomb" but "Super Villain" is awesome.

Hey, how 'bout that? DLC from an old band that doesn't include their newest single. Or anything from the new album. I actually like "The Sound of Winter" and another one they've been playing on our local rock station. I would not have minded having them in Rockband. But I'm glad Harmonix listened to the fans and stuck with the old stuff this time. It kinda makes up for them slipping back to 3 songs a week.

Heart – Alone Mr. Big – To Be With You * Poison – Every Rose Has Its Thorn * Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up

I'm not kidding. Next week you will be able to rickroll yourself in Rockband. Or maybe rickrolling will evolve into tricking people into watching videos of bad runs of "Never Gonna Give You Up". Which will be shocking because I'm sure it'll be an easy song.

I'll actually be picking it up, because I'm old enough to remember when it was just a good song, and not a meme. Ditto for "To Be With You". Both of those are old-school guilty pleasure songs. '80s pop had a transcendent quality to it, even if you were a metalhead (I was) you could appreciate it (or at least I did). You just can't say the same for the New Kids, the Backstreet Boys, Britney, Christina, or Miley.

With nearly 20 top-ten singles under their belt, San Francisco-based rock & rollers Huey Lewis and the News’ remarkable career has spanned more than 30 years. The band made their Rock Band debut with “The Power of Love” on the Rock Band 3 disc, and now three more of the group’s hits are headed to the Music Store on February 28th.

“Do You Believe in Love,” from 1982’s Picture This, and the band’s first top ten hit, kicks off the three pack. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” and “I Want a New Drug” – both from their platinum-selling third record, 1983’s Sports – round out this collection of chart-topping hits. All songs will feature support for keyboards, with a Pro Guitar and Pro Bass upgrade available for “I Want a New Drug.”

Available on Xbox 360, Wii™ and PlayStation®3 system (February 28th, 2012):

Definitely getting the Huey Lewis pack. I knew "Do You Believe in Love" but I somehow disassociated it with Huey Lewis. So I didn't recognize the title, but when I heard the song, I said, "oh yeah I know that song!". Being old, haha.

"The Heart of Rock & Roll" should have been on-disc. I would still get the pack with "The Power of Love" in its place. They're all great songs.

...Oh, that's why. "Do You Believe in Love" wasn't on Sports. That was the Huey Lewis record (phonograph) I had.

RockbandAide wrote:

With last week’s announcement of Huey Lewis & the News, we have exhausted our queue of artists that have been teased as coming to Rock Band as DLC. We’re a short time away from St. Patrick’s Day, and the possibility exists of seeing another Harmonix livestream with a few artist teasings, but until then we’re back to blind guesses at what DLC may be coming. Hopefully we will get an announcement this week that people will enjoy…

I'm down for "Santa Monica". Average '90s fare, but still decent. Wife wants "The Anthem". She woke me up telling me, and I thought she said "Dance Floor Anthem", which is actually decent (IMO). Neither of us care about the Mastodon track.

I set up my Ions again for the first time in years, and realized quickly why I stopped playing - static overload. I then hit THE GOOGLE, and found the dryer sheet mod - which I executed. No success. It's not feasible for me to get my kit off the rug and onto carpet without getting too far from the TV. I'm sort of at a loss, though I'm considering redoing the mod and electrical-taping everything too.

It is definitely static though, as post-mod I can trigger it on-demand by getting my hands anywhere near the rubber heads.

I'm in a similar bind with drums, although it's far simpler. I play on Easy Pro Drums, and I accept that I'll never be an expert player. I don't care to be -- I lack the coordination. But I do like drumming, and I hope to move up to Medium. I can play some songs on Medium, and just need to work on the fast parts. Thing is, I'm struggling with Pro. I like the cymbals, but when they fall, it really sucks, and I can't get them to stay for more than one song.

My wife says it's how I grip the sticks. She's an expert pro drummer, can gold star most of the first few tiers no problem, so she's definitely qualified to judge my technique. I guess you could say I hold the drumsticks like I would hold a hammer. And she wants me to hold the sticks more like forks and let them bounce better, but I can't control the bounce. That's all stuff I need to work on on my own; I fully expect the drummers here to say she's right. She is. But the damn cymbals slipping is making me just want to go to regular drums. It's aggravating because the cymbals don't bother me, even when songs want to jump from pads to cymbals, like the snare-tom-tom-crash or a run of snare-tom followed by snare-crash or crash-kick. And if I play non-pro, I tend to hit the cymbals anyway, and don't want to develop bad habits.

This is why I mostly stick to singing, except I've been sick, so that doesn't work for long. (Good thing I got Skyrim...)

Anyway, I know a lot of people have been saying Three Days Grace shouldn't be in Rockband. I don't see why, they're about average as far as nu-metal goes. If you don't like nu-metal, you save some money. If you do, well, it's just a damn shame "Animal I Have Become" got left off.

RockbandAide wrote:

D’oh. Looks like the Rock Band DLC announcement may have been posted a little premature. While I was looking around wondering if I was the only one to see it, and thus as a favor to Harmonix hold off on saying anything, it looks like others may have also seen the same thing, so I guess that makes it fair game? (That’s how I’m rationalizing it, anyway.)

Three Days Grace – The Good Life Three Days Grace – I Hate Everything About You Three Days Grace – Pain *

* Denotes Pro-Guitar/Bass chart availability for $.99.

Seriously, "The Good Life"? Eh, it's okay, but "Animal I Have Become" would have been better. Guess they gotta appeal to the label, though. It could have replaced "I Hate Everything About You"; for that song title, we should have gotten the one by Ugly Kid Joe, along with their cover of Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle". Because we just don't have enough epic story songs like "Juke Box Hero" and "Shooting Star".

For the record, I solved (mostly) my Ion disconnection issue. The culprit? A wool rug. Turns out, I generate a lot of static while playing. In my old apartment, I was on carpet in an fairly arid climate, and never seemed to have an issue. The current residence has a wool rug laid over bamboo. Simply moving the kit off the rug (and rearranging my whole setup to do so) was enough to drop the static buildup incredibly. Now I build up a decent charge by the end of a song, but discharging into the pads doesn't even cause the system to disconnect.

The only problem is the pedal (damn its evil soul) slides around like a hockey player, and I don't have the spare money to fix it (yes, I'm THAT broke).

Any pricing on RB:B? I'm thinking $20 and that it will be part of Microsoft's "Summer of Arcade" promo. They usually feature high-end Arcade games that come out at staggered dates (e.g. four games, every 3 weeks) in the summer and IIRC none have been above $20.

Thanks for the control setup. That makes a lot of sense. I never played FreQuency or Amplitude on the PS2, but I have played Audiosurf on the PC. Is it similar to those?

For what it's worth (probably not much), I picked up Rock Revolution the other day for 99¢. This was Konami's "me-too" attempt to get in on the Rockband/Guitar Hero party (yes, I know they did it first over in Japan). I figure it's worth at least a buck's worth of fun. I didn't know that it doesn't have vocals, so I go in with my controller. It asks if I want to play drums or guitar. Rockband won't allow this with a controller, but the guitar-only Guitar Hero games (3/Aerosmith and prior) would, so I chose drums. It worked... sort of. All the songs are covers, and the first one it presented me with, "Falling Away From Me" (by Korn -- it never tells you who the original artist is, as far as I can tell), was a terrible cover. So I chose my character (Duke -- the best one is the default, unless you want a female avatar) and hit the stage.

Rock Revolution drum sets have six pads and a kick pedal, and all are simulated if you use a gamepad. Red, green, blue, and yellow use the buttons you'd expect. Silver is hit by squeezing in on the left analog stick. Magenta is LB, and orange (the kick pedal) is RB. To deploy overdrive, you hit the outer two and stomp at the same time, or, on the controller, LB+RB+B. It's very confusing, but the kick pedal is left out entirely on Beginner and Easy. My wife chose guitar, and found it completely unplayable with the controller. If you use a real instrument, you get fewer lanes, but for drums, kick pedal notes aren't a bar, they're a sort of shield-shaped thing.

The biggest impediment, I thought, was that the notes come down vertically, rather than Rockband/Guitar Hero's perspective highway. This makes planning ahead harder, since you're scanning up and down. And on expert, the notes seem to blur. But where Rockband 3 (and RB2 did this, too) will tax my Xbox and make it drop frames, Rock Revolution never did (it's probably not doing any fancy multitrack stuff, and it has nothing to do with vocals, so it's not working the Xbox as hard, I wouldn't think).

Also, it has a couple features Rockband 3 doesn't have. One is a progressive difficulty increase. You start on Medium, and a third of the way into the song, it seamlessly rises to Hard. 2/3 of the way in, you're bumped up to Expert. My wife said one of the Guitar Hero games did this, though. The other is poison notes. Some notes are black. Play them, and you lose a life. You have five lives. There's also a minimum score. My wife passed "Falling Away From Me" on expert guitar (on a real RB1 guitar, not the controller) without hitting a single poison note, but she failed because she didn't get 300,000 points.

It's worth noting that Rock Revolution (I'm resisting the urge to call it Rock Revulsion) is pretty good if you consider that Rockband goes beyond the game and well into simulation territory. Rock Revolution doesn't take itself that seriously at all. The charting isn't great, the covers suck, and the gameplay mechanics are not something anybody asked for, but it's alright. I wouldn't have paid any more than a buck for it, though. It was $5 at Best Buy a year ago and we didn't pay that for it. (We did get Track Pack 2 for $5 along with Rock Revolution, though. We already had 12 of the songs, but $5 for the other 8 isn't bad, and we can get the achievements.)

I recently picked up a Rock Pedal for my ION kit. I figured out how to get the double bass/hi-hat pedal working without spending $30 for the double bass kit. All I needed was some adapters from Radio Shack. I am using the Rock Pedal as my main bass pedal, and the stock ION as the secondary. The key is to get an adapter that converts from a 1/4" stereo male connector that is split out to a 1/8" mono female, and a 1/4" mono female. I plug the Rock Pedal into the 1/8", and the ION pedal into the 1/4". Since it's doubtful they make such a cable, I was able to pick up the following parts that did the trick:

The first adapter converts from a 1/4" stereo male to two mono female RCA plugs. The other two adapters convert from male mono RCA plugs to female 1/4" or 1/8" plugs. With this set up the white RCA plug is for the main pedal, so I plugged the 1/8" converted into it, and then plugged the Rock Pedal into that. I plugged the 1/4" adapter into the red plug, and the ION pedal into that.

Once in Rock Band 3, you just need to go to drum options and select whether you want a double bass, or a hi-hat pedal. Remember the hi-hat pedal only changes the sound from open to closed for free form sections, so the double bass is probably more useful. This setup doesn't have the problem that many straight splitters have where one pedal doesn't work when the other is pressed down. This should work with the stock MadCatz pedals as well, or any other compatible pedal. Just remember to use a stereo male 1/4" that splits out to two mono connectors that correspond to whatever the connectors are on your pedals. These connectors cost around $13 for me, but you might be able to get them for much less. Still a lot cheaper than the ION Double Bass kit, especially if you have an extra pedal lying around.

2 months is too long for this topic to remain dormant. So, I'm bringing it back.

Does anyone remember when I've said (at least once or twice) that I'd like a rivalry feature where you can compete directly against a friend via leaderboards, and see who has the better scores by song, so you can improve your standings against one person? Well, that now exists on RockbandScores.com. You don't need to register, and you don't need the permission of anybody you look up. And you can have cross-platform rivalries. Wanna see how you stack up to me? My gamertag is Dark Reality X on Xbox 360, and I mostly sing. I'm not the best, but I'm around #160 on the global 360 leaderboards for vocalists, so I'm not bad either.

Since my wife and her brother have a real rivalry going on on pro drums, so I used it to compare them. I then imported it into a LibreOffice spreadsheet, sorted it by song title (artist name isn't given at all), and used conditional formatting to color the "Difference" score green if my wife has the better score, or red if her brother does. RBS doesn't track total scores, but I did that with a SUM function, and replaced the score difference text with a formula, so when I update it (by looking them up individually once a week and manually entering their new scores), the differences recalculate, and the totals update. Oh, my wife's ahead ~90 million to ~53 million. It's a slaughter. He's only ever done drums, but she started out on vocals and picked up drums a few years ago.

Good band, crap pick, goes to show that Harmonix have no sense of artistic integrity. I mean, if we can't get the music that made the band special in the first place, what's the point? I'll be passing on it -- I won't buy a crappy song by a band that used to be good for a franchise that is struggling to stay relevant. Backlog's big enough as it is.

Also, do not get the Xbox Live dashboard update (beta) if you play Rockband. A couple days ago, no wireless instrument controllers work. Now they do but are only partly functional. Haven't tried guitar yet, but on drums, only the green cymbal works. Yellow and blue hit their color plus green. In navigation, yellow and blue perform both functions at once (scroll plus rate or song info). And pro drums is unavailable. So it's screwy all around.

Control Group wrote:

One song is disappointing.

And if it was going to be only one song, it should have been FantasMic, the song The Poet and the Pendulum was partially based on.

I'm a bit meh about it at the moment, but I haven't really seen any footage of the game. One thing that I heard about which annoyed me was that the whole track plays even if you're not playing the notes. I loved 'building' the song up from scratch in Amplitude.